What Happened to Us
by hopestar789
Summary: A short story about the conversation I envision that happened after 4x15, "A Short Story about Love."


"What happened to us?"

The way she said it – factual, as if she were in the field establishing a scene – crushed him. He wondered if he could ever make up for the years of abuse, the years of experimentation, the years of loss that had created this intellectual acceptance of her own suffering. Too much of which was at his hands.

He kissed the crown of her head, dug his nose into her hair. They were lying on her bed, the same bed he remembered but with different sheets, facing each other in the blue light from her window.

"What do you remember?" His voice vibrated low in the dark that draped over them.

"You getting into the machine." She leaned back, looked into his eyes. "Your face."

"My face?"

She hesitated and put a hand to his cheek. "You didn't make a sound, but you were shaking. You looked like you were in pain, like…" Olivia looked down and to the side, the way she always did when a thought, emotion swelled to a size too large to bear.

Peter cupped her face, and her tension fell away at his touch. He didn't deserve her. Never had. She took a breath, pursed her lips, and glanced back. "It looked like you were being forced to watch torture, like something was being taken from you."

His throat clenched, and he choked and swallowed. Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn't this. He pulled back, looked at her face, and stroked her cheek, then her forehead with his thumb. The skin was smooth, taut, with bare hints of the wrinkles he had watched deepen in them over the course of twenty years as her husband, the only forfeit to age her body had allowed in a crumbling world. Until that forehead had been ripped open by a bullet shot by his own father.

"Something was taken." His voice caught, and his eyes pinched at the sudden salt sting. Peter pressed his forehead to hers and rested his hand on the warm spot where her neck curved with the base of her head, taking a moment to breath. He pulled her closer. He could smell her, that blend of mint and something soft in the cold, like a lavender bloom in the early spring. Her fingernails scraped his head as she mimicked his pose, and she tucked herself closer to him. When she slipped her arm around him, he could feel her as she matched the rise and fall of her chest to his. She steadied him.

Her breath was a bare breeze against his skin. "I died?" There was nothing but a question in her voice.

Peter swallowed, but he pulled back. He looked into the warm green of her eyes and shook his head. "No. No. That time, when I stepped into the machine, it took me forward. I saw what I had done. It took me to a time that, after I walked into the machine, the other side disappeared. It vanished. I made it vanish." He paused at the burn at the top of his throat. "But it turned out that dooming their side doomed us as well, and our world was falling apart. I mean, everywhere. Warp holes, huge cracks in the fabric of our side. Whole cities disappeared. Chicago disappeared." Olivia's eyes flashed and then went dark, and she looked down. It was a faint echo of her pain when they had been in the Fringe operations unit and watched the screen as a red circle grew and smothered Chicago on the map. Smothered her sister. "Fifteen years later, and we all had maybe another ten if we could keep the holes patched."

Olivia nodded and squared her shoulders, as if she was bracing for taking on that world again. "So we were all dying?"

Peter smiled and ran his fingers through her hair. "No. We were living. See, the horrible, funny, terrible thing is that I was happy." Olivia's eyes met his again, and he paused. He looked at her face, soft with youth, and remembered two years fetching coffee, taking phone calls at 3 AM, and trailing behind her at crime scenes. All for a chance to help and this hope, this one wish, that she would turn around, turn around to him. He remembered how she had and how he had taken that one chance and then thrown it in her face because he failed to notice that the woman he was with wasn't the one he had been following.

For one moment, he was afraid it wasn't the time. He had just gotten her back. They had just gotten each other back. It could be too much, too soon. And he couldn't risk spooking her, losing her now.

"Peter?" Olivia's fingers brushed his cheek, and her eyes searched his face. Worried.

 _For some reason, I'm not afraid anymore_.

As Peter stared back at her, he could not help the pressure of that remembered joy, the easy grace of brushing his teeth in the same sink, scrubbing the stains off the bottom of the coffee pot, sitting at the table with her day after day going through the mail. A small grin pressed across his face. "Olivia, I was happy. Sure, it wasn't perfect. People were dying. Walter was in prison. But I'd never been…thing is, I got to spend that time with you. Fifteen years, and thirteen of them, I was married to you."

The fan whirred above them. A small golden chain fell from it and swung in small, slow circles with its movement. Olivia blinked, and her eyes darted down, but then they darted up again. She focused on him, her expression unreadable.

"And then…that's when…that's when you died." Peter felt his chest seize, and his hands cupped her head, holding her. He looked at her perfect face, unmarked, and the panic flashed down his arms and legs. "Walternate…Walternate shot you. The whole world was doomed from the minute I got in that machine, but my world only ended…" His eyes closed, and he remembered the picture stuck to the side of the fridge, all of the things he would never have. He concentrated on the noise of the fan, let it crowd out the noise of the picture. "So Walter found a way. To bring me forward so that I would see in the machine what happened. So I made a bridge to stop the world from ending, and I disappeared."

Olivia ducked her head, and she put a hand on his chest. He had never before been so aware of the pounding in his ribs. As the terror of what had happened to them passed, as the memories settled, he released a deep breath.

Outside, he had stood in the cold, felt the feeling leave his toes and nose, but it was warm inside. Lying next to Olivia, he could feel her heat, her closeness. He allowed his eyes to close. For months, he had been absorbed in trying to find a way back to her. He had pushed the horror of the future they'd avoided aside. It had haunted his nights and thoughts, but here, with her, it overwhelmed him. It overwhelmed him that something so warm could go cold so fast.

"So…we were married?"

Peter's eyes opened. Olivia stared at him, a small smile ghosting her lips. Peter nodded, sighed, and smiled. "Yeah."

Olivia scrunched, readjusted herself on the bed. She curled in closer. "So where did we live?"

"That street over by Concord you like? We had a house there."

At this, a true grin spread across her face, and she laughed. "I thought you liked it better closer to Lexington."

"Well, I just couldn't say no to these counters in the place. The countertops were pretty amazing. And you should have seen the hardwood floors."

There, safe in the dark, it was hard to remember she had seen those hardwood floors. She had gone with him on a tour of the house, and her face had melted, the way it sometimes did when she was happy, as she looked around the living room, out the bay windows. They had signed for it that day. And then she had died.

"Was I starting to get fat and old?" Her eyebrows raised, a challenge.

Peter snorted. "You were within five pounds of your weight now. And, to my credit, I was within ten. Though, to be fair, my hairline wasn't quite what you see today. And maybe even a little gray."

She smiled and tilted her head, running her fingers through the hair over his ears. "I don't know. They say silver hair makes a man look distinguished."

"Make sure and tell that to Walter when you see him next."

A small laugh escaped her. He had forgotten how much he craved every smile, every laugh. Each one was something rare, precious. Then she was quiet, and her brow folded into a small v in the space between her eyes. She looked at him, her voice soft. "Children?"

Peter swallowed and shook his head just a bit one way, then the other. "No. End of the world. Didn't seem right." He didn't mention that he had suggested it anyways. "But…" Here he stopped again, afraid this was all too much, too soon. But he couldn't hold back, not from her. "But we did have Ella. She spent high school with us, got inducted into Fringe division."

Through her eyes, Peter witnessed it all again, a precursor for things that would never be. What Ella's presence had to mean, the happiness that she made it out, that she was there, pride at what she became. Hidden underneath the pale, smooth skin, her eyes said it all.

When she chose to speak, she chose her worst and best thoughts. "To grow up without her parents…but even then she was a fighter. She will be a fighter." Peter ran his fingers through her hair, waited for those eyes to process and fall on him when she was done. There was a faint pattering, like the sound of feathers brushing wood, as the wind struck the window with small snowflakes. Olivia raised her eyes to him, which had reverted back to that first stage, the one of haunted acceptance. But there was something else that accompanied it now.

"She has a different future." Her gaze hummed with an electricity, a power, that struck him unaware.

"Yeah." Peter nodded, and he took her hand that still rested on his chest. "Yeah, she does."

"You gave us a different future." Olivia pulled on their closed hands until she was next to him, her body flush with his. She tilted her head, and Peter's eyes shuttered almost against his will, his lips brushing hers. She pulled harder until his body draped hers. Their hands extended, still clasped, falling onto a pillow.

And, he knew he was rushing it and ahead of himself or whatever, but he saw them in a new house, a new house with different wooden floors and a different picture taped to the refrigerator door.


End file.
